2022 as the Play2Earn year, Luna with no fear, and some DAO, DAO and DAO (weekly crypto updates)
One eventful week, with Iran, China and South Korea fighting against mining in general, and crypto in particular, NFTs still going strong, and some hints that 2022 will be the yer of Play2Earn blockchain games (as people considered 2020 being the year of DEFI, and 2021 the year of NFTs). What else? Check bellow:
Bitcoin: Iran halted all the registered crypto miners over the winter, in a bid to reduce the electric consumpion across the country, until March 6. Iran is responsible for 5-7% of the global hashrate for Bitcoin. Just as a fun fact, Bitcoin is the best performing asset class for the third year in a row. DEFIChain is a decentralized finance, working to bring DEFI on the Bitcoin network. Sound cool enough for me. As China banned mining, Thai entepreneurs are buying the mining machins at discounted prices.
Ethereum: ETH Hashrate reached a record high of 1 Petahash (1000 Terrahash), with the bigger miner being ethermine.org, followed by F2Pool and Poolin's (there are a total of 61 mining pools on ETH). Ethereum network did an upgrade and implemented the Arrow Glacier upgrade, delaying the proof-of-stake transition for now. As numbers of ETH addresses with non-zero balance, we got 71.3M in December 2021, as opposed to 51.5M in December 2020. ETH 2.0 Rocket Pool reached more than $350M in TVL, as they allow any user to run a node for 16 ETH, half the amount needed for a ETH2 deposit contract. Don't forget, if you ever need a bridge from L1 to L2 on ETH Network, check Across protocol. They rule with impunity, related to speed and security.
Altcoins: Convex Finance, did you hear about them? They were a DEFI designed to aggresivelly accumulate Curve tokens, and guess what, now they are the largest holder of CRV, meaning they can also have a say in their governance. Check them, as a success story gone right. On Polkadot, we got the second round of auctions for parachains, started on 23rd of December. Cardano founder, Charles Hoskinson, talked about the network growth plan for 2022 in a Chistmas video. Cardano is the most developed blockchain in 2021, with over 140K developer events. AAVE launched a market for real-world assets, letting his users to lend and borrow using cryptocurrency, based on the market demand. Dfinity's Internet Computer launched a cross chain bridge - Terabethia - from their blockchain to ETH, allowing ERC-20 tokens to exist on their network. Terra (LUNA) is now officially the second largest DEFI network, with more than $21B, with only 13 DEFI protocols (BSC as the third one has 225). Imagine the possibilities. Did you hear about Aoki, an algorithmic stablecoin on Arbitum, backed up by Alameda Research, launched on December 23. Seems interesting, but personally, I do not like these kind of tokens. Robinhood will allow users to deposit and withdraw BTC, ETH, DOGE and few more other tokens very soon. Efinity (EFI) won the sixth Polkadot parachain auction, being onboarded in March. To conclude, all the eyes are now on Terra (LUNA) after their 13000% increase in 2021.
NFTs: One of the latest celebrity APE-ing into NFTs is Eminem himself, who bought a BAYC with hip hop attire and dazed look, and more than 20 other NFTs under the OpenSea alias of Shady_Holding. Kraken marketplace is now allowing NFT-Collateralized loans now. In 2021, CryptoPunks was one of the first, well known NFT collection. One on their NFT sold on auction at Sotheby's with $11.75M, and even VISA bought one Punk for $150K. Beeple was one of the most succesful artist, selling his ''Everydays: the first 5000 days'' NFT for $69.3M. Samsung new smart tv can be used now to buy NFTs, they said. Ozzy Osbourne himself joined the NFT craze with his new collection Cryptobatz, releasing 4000 of them, just because his wife, Sharon, didn't let him to buy a Bored Ape. Jamestown LP, the owner of One Times Square, is recreating his own 26 floors building in Decentraland. OpenSea froze 16 NFTs woth 615 ETH ($2.28M) allegedly being stolen from a NY art gallery operator. Ftactal is the newest NFT marketplace, founder by the Twitch own Justin Kan. This will be linked to games sooner than we imagine.
Blockchain games: The second phase of the Chaos Legion pack sale in Splinterlands will end on January 12th, and you can buy the packs after that with only 4$ per pack, without needing vouchers. Two card airdrops are expected once the second phase of the sale ends, with a guaranteed drop for every 300 packs bought by a customer, but a gold card is not guaranteed this time. Each pack has a 0.33% chance to drop an aidrop reward card. The two cards are a no-damage tank with heal, boosts and magic resist for Water, and a high armor-high life 4 Melee damage Life tank with heal and Recharge (12 damage every 2 rounds without attack boost). There are talks about SPS Validator nodes, wiht governance and rewards linked to them also, and a mini edition of cards called Rift Watchers is expected in the second quarter, available only for SPS tokens. South Korea Government asked the app stored to remove the existing Play2Earn blockchain games, and they banned all the gaming prizes above 3 dollars. They even reach Apple and Google about this issue. Also in South Korea, the Coinone exchange wants to halt withdrawals to all the unverified external wallets, asking for names and resident registration numbers. By the way, did you know that AXS, the token from Axie Infinity, grew from $0.45 to a $160 high, a 17500% grow, in 2021? And today 3M people own Axies, c0mpared with only 27K one year ago.
Good news: SuperUMAns DAO just launched few days ago, with the full support of Uma Project team, and there is a lot to learn from them. You can find more about it on discord. In US, senator Cynthia Lummis, you know, one of those holding BTC, is working on a very comprehensive and including bill covering everything about digital assets, well, almost everything, as they are inovating faster than they are regulated anyway. Binance is on their way to be regulated and get licence in Bahrain. They also registered in Canada recently and received their approval from FINTRAC, the anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism regulator. DeBank (a DEFI tracker company) had a $25M equity round sale, and now their valuation is $200M. NuCypher and Keep Threshold merged succesfully, and they elected their council members (4 from each company) with the final results on 30th of December. Microstrategy is still buying, adding another 1914 BTC to their stash in December, and they are holding 124.391 BTC right now. Jamaica completed their CBDC pilot, and they will rollout their own currency in the first quarter of 2022. In the opposite part of the world, Thailand delayed their CBDC pilot testing.
Bad news: After saying in September that they have no intention to embrace crypto, they Turkey president is drafting a bill right now regarding them. There are rumours about a digital Turkish Lira or something similar being worked on too. Polygon team has patched a critical network vulnerability, after a whitehat hacker notified their security group Immunefi about it. The specialist was paid almost $3.5M for his hard work, but if a malicious actor would have exploit the bug, there was a potential of more that $24B in Matic to be stolen - 90% of the total supply. Crypto broker Voyager is the target of a proposed class action lawsuit, related to the customers being misled and charged hidden fees. If you are doing crypto-fraud in UAE, you risk a possible 5 year jail sentence starting from 1.01.2022.
Joke of the week: There is a new DAO, called Blockbuster DAO, aiming to raise $5M in order to buy Blockbuster, the company, from Dish Network, and to develop a decentralized film streaming bussiness, big enough to acquire Netflix at some moment in the future. The irony! (If you didn't know, long time ago, in 2000, when Blockbuster was worth $5B, Netflix offered to be bought with $50M, but Blockbuster considered the offer too expensive, we all know what happened next.)
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim).
...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi, Hodlnaut and Celsius.network. Get ETH while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Check my Lbry.tv channel in here and use Torum instead of Twitter . I am also writing on Read.cash.
